While I have been known to complain about some of the course books I have to use, I would find it very difficult to be totally course book or syllabus free. (I admit this may be due to lack of practice)

Of course, there are also the students' and the school's expectations to consider. Our students are used to having a course book. In our teaching centre, there is one allocated to each level, a syllabus to follow and exams to promote. Although I miss out the bits that I don't feel the students need or will be interested in, I do in general work my way through both the syllabus and the course book.

The students seem to accept this as reasonable rationale for the activities we do in class. (Students in Portugal generally accept that the teachers make the decisions in the classroom - offering choice often leads to indecision.)

So, for a while now I have been feeling a little bit guilty about my reliance on materials, partly for environmental reasons, though I do my best to double-side, recycle etc. where possible, and partly because I seem to live permanently engulfed by paper.

Also I am concerned that, by using the course book and syllabus (or related materials) as the guide or starting point for the content of my lessons, rather than capitalising on the potential of my students and involving them more in the whole pedagogic process, I am not focussing sufficiently on the learners and their inherent ability.

It is for this reason that I wanted to investigate Dogme, and in this article I will relate my experience of it. Though I have to say, the idea of going into the classroom without my little life-raft of course book and materials made me nervous!

Planning what to do
I looked at the Dogme website (www.teaching-unplugged.com) to get some ideas for the lesson. The activities are generally based on the correction of language produced in the class.

For one erroneous utterance:

• collect similar errors the students have made and put them on the board for students to correct
• elicit substitutions of the form e.g. X makes me Y, and see how many students can think of in X minutes

For several sentences which need correcting:

• learners translate the corrected sentences into L1, clean the board and get them to translate them back into English
• ask students to reconstruct from memory the part of the conversation which contained the elicited sentence
• re-enact the conversation with the student then get others to roleplay it in pairs
• write a new conversation incorporating some of the corrected sentences, practise and perform
• get students to test each other, saying either the L1 version or the uncorrected version, for the other to translate or correct

Ways of capturing whole conversations for language focus:

• students reconstruct the conversation using what they can remember of it
• have the conversation at the front of the class, pretending to be a tape recorder with "pause" and "rewind"
• extract some useful, functional chunks of language and get students to try and incorporate them (naturally) in a conversation on the same topic
• extract relevant grammar points and students write their own grammar reference; the same could be done for vocabulary
• students could design a test e.g. gapfill, jumbled sentences, based on the text
• get students to reformulate the spoken text into a letter, report etc
• role play the conversation as if it were a television interview, recording it at the same time, then focus on its strengths and weaknesses
• get students to prepare questions about the subject being discussed, collect the questions for study and analysis, then perform similar conversations in pairs
• roleplay the situation being discussed e.g. a holiday, at its various stages (at the hotel, customs etc.) or a conversation with the person when they get back

The lesson

The teaching unplugged website has four sample lessons of Scott Thornbury's (containing some of the activities above and others). They influenced the lesson plan I tried out with my students, which was as follows:

1. brainstorm conversation topics
2. have a written conversation about the topics with a partner
3. discuss any interesting/problematic language items
4. practise the above (students' suggestions)

Materials: paper and pens (which it is assumed students bring to class).

My guinea pigs were to be my Advanced level class, the majority of whom were aged between 16 and their mid-twenties. I felt they were perhaps ideally suited to this kind of approach as they have already mastered the basics of English and so have less need for a syllabus and a structured format to the lesson.

My objectives

I had various objectives in using the Dogme approach with my students:

• to evaluate the Dogme approach, giving students the opportunity to generate their own materials and decide how they want to exploit them
• to give students the opportunity to choose the topic of the lesson and language focus of the lesson

With Dogme, students are more overtly responsible for the success or failure of a lesson. Students can guide the lesson towards areas they are interested in and areas they have problems with.

I was concerned that this may be an approach not easily adapted to - one lesson may not be enough to allow for its true potential to come out. Another concern was that it is heavily reliant on student input and noticing skills. (As I said before, Portuguese students tend to be used to teacher-led classes).

I was fortunate to be observed - the following comments are a result of collective feedback with my observer.

Post-lesson analysis

The students had no problems thinking of topics to talk about. I had decided to do the 'paper conversation' with the topics in order to generate texts (from one of Thornbury's lesson examples on the Dogme site).

One thing I'm not a hundred per cent sure of with Dogme is how much the teacher decides and how much the students are supposed to decide. I realise it has to be student-centred but it seems to me the teacher has to have an idea of what they want the outcome of the lesson to be and also have ideas up their sleeve in case the students don't.

I could have just asked the students to have oral conversations (or given them the choice) but I would have found it difficult to monitor. However, had I shared this with the students maybe they would have come up with a solution. So, strictly speaking I failed this stage by imposing the paper conversations on them.

Once the conversations had finished I then asked the students what they wanted to do with them. "Read them" came the reply. "How?" I asked. Once more I'm ashamed to say I imposed the nature of reading on them. A couple of students wanted to read them out loud, but, realising that not everybody wanted to do that, I said, "We'll put them round the class." As the observer said, those who wanted to read out loud could have, and those that didn't could have put their conversations around the class. (From the teacher point of view I could only see complications in terms of monitoring.)

I did better when it came to what to look for while reading and how to exploit the texts once the language points had been focussed on.

I think that's another thing I needed to have clear in my mind - how to monitor in every eventuality (though as I said before, this could be discussed with the class). Eavesdropping on bits of conversation is rather unsatisfactory, although it may give insight to overall problems students are having.

In order to apply Dogme, the teacher has to be prepared to think on their feet. I personally prefer to have thought things through beforehand (and anticipated problems) and maybe this is what prevented me from reacting in an appropriately Dogmatic (?) way to my students.

The language focus consisted of new vocabulary and lexis and wasn't as extensive as hoped. This may be because the students chose to do the feedback as a class and so about only three or four really contributed.

The observer said she didn't feel the students had been stretched linguistically, basically because there was no outside input (the students didn't ask for any vocabulary while writing). This was another area which couldn't be predicted and once more I found it quite stressful having to immediately comment on and correct expressions they had noticed.

I've experienced similar situations with other Dogme lessons I've tried - new language tends to be generated from my participation in activities, but there seems to be limited benefit linguistically between students. I imagine this would be different in the perfect Dogme world where students would not be subject to 'streaming'.

The feedback from students however, was very favourable. They said the lesson was "fun", "memorable" and enjoyed the fact it was so student-centred. One said it was a shame they had to study for the Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) exam. I pointed out that during the lesson they had practised the 4 skills (including extensive reading!) all of which is good practice, even if not directly related to the exam. Their ideas for using the texts included register transfer, which shows how some explicit exam practice could be given using student-produced material.

In conclusion, a great deal seems to depend on the personality of the teacher - whether they are confident, they can think on their feet and respond effectively to every situation posed in a Dogme class. Adrian Underhill (in Teaching without a coursebook) stated that teaching without the support of a course book can be "risky and fraught with problems".

In order to really stretch students linguistically, I think input needs to come from either the teacher or "materials". Authentic materials appear to be permitted in Dogme (obtained from the internet, newspapers etc.) and this for me would seem to be the way forward, at least for my students. (Thornbury "Posting 3")

In general

I continued to be course book free with my elementary class in subsequent lessons. I felt this to be most liberating (though it took me a couple of lessons to find my feet). I didn't have to choose a particular day to present language. There was a lot of negotiation between us all about the language used and the language we were looking at was far more natural (e.g. "Chin up!" for cheer up, "it makes me…").

Interestingly it produced lots of "chunks". There is also language for everyone - the weaker students are able to keep up and there are more complicated phrases for stronger students.

Overall

Dogme has definitely affected the way I view the materials I use in class. From now on I will make sure that I deal with materials (even those from the course book) in a more student-centred way, endeavouring to engage them as individuals and consult them on their preferences in terms of how to deal with them.

I clearly need to experiment with being less of a 'control freak' and practise handing decisions over to the students. It's only recently I started getting students reactions to individual activities and their preferences about how to do them (rather than their general opinion and at the end of the class) and asking for their feedback.

It has taken me a bit of time to absorb and put into practice the whole Dogme approach. I feel it's an area I need to and definitely will continue to experiment with in order to incorporate it successfully into my teaching repertoire.

Bibliography
Thornbury, S and Meddings, Using the raw materials MET Vol 10 No 4 2001
Thornbury, S. and Meddings, L. Using a coursebook the Dogme way MET Vol 11 2002
Larsen-Freeman, D. Techniques & Principles in Language Teaching. Oxford American English 1986

Articles taken from the internet (www.teaching-unplugged.com)
Thornbury, S. A Dogma for EFL
Thornbury, S. Teaching Unplugged (or that's Dogme with an E)
Underhill, A. Teaching without a coursebook
French, D. The Dogme Discussion Group
Gill, S. Against Dogme: A plea for moderation
Thornbury, S. Grammar, power and bottled water
Thornbury, S. and Meddings, L. The Roaring in the Chimney (or: what coursebooks are good for)

Cathy Wilson
Teacher, British Council, Lisbon.